The Second Crusade by Dan Jones

 

In the middle of June 1146, as northern Europe began to stir itself for crusade, George of Antioch, the grizzled vizier of Sicily, sailed a fleet of ships to the shores of the Muslim-ruled Ifriqiya and prepared to attack the city of western Tripoli (Tarabalus al-Gharb, a city found on the coast of modern-day Libya). Somewhere close to his sixtieth birthday, distinguished by his long white hair and full, straight, neatly manicured beard, George has been a prominent minister in the court of Roger II for neatly half his life. He was a financial expert and an adept administrator, but he was nowhere more effective than in command of a fleet of galleys. George’s honorific title – ammiratus ammiratorum- could be translated from its Latin form as ‘emir of emirs,’ although an alternative rendering was ‘admiral of admirals. During the summer of 1146 he confronted the walls of Tripoli and considered the best way to bring the inhabitants quickly into obedience.

George had been in these waters many times before. Born to a Syrian Christian family, he had trained in public accountancy in pre-crusader Antioch and subsequently at the Zirid court in Mahdia, the largest port in Ifriqiya, which lay almost four hundred miles along the coast from Tripoli. Some time shortly after 1108 he absconded and arrived in Sicilian service, working in the cities of Messina and Palermo, and occasionally visiting the Fatimid court in Cairo as an envoy. From the 1120s he led raids on the coastal towns of his former employers; in 1142, he returned to Mahdia, sailed right into the harbor and confiscated ships at anchor, as punishment for the Zirids’ defaults on their debts to King Roger for shipments of Sicilian grain. Since then he has overseen yearly attacks, plundering and conquering strongholds including Djidejelli, Brask and the Kerkennah Islands.

The reason for the sudden wave of Sicilian aggression was that Zirid Ifriqiya was starving and vulnerable. North African harvests had been failing, and unrest had ripped through the coastal cities and countryside  alike. ‘Because of starvation the nomads sought out the towns and the townspeople closed their gates against them,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir. ‘Plague and great mortality followed. The countryside was emptied and from while families not a single person survived.’ The effects soon touched Sicily. Piracy was rife in Ifriqiyan ports and the gold caravans  that traveled to the coast from Sudan were disrupted by general unrest. Refugees came flooding across the Mediterranean to Sicily in the hope of finding food and safety. Their desperate state persuaded the king and his vizier that conquering Ifriqiya, a deed that Roger’s father had eyed with skepticism and caution, was now tantalizingly possible.

Tripoli was no small target, for it was defended by both seaward and landward walls. But according to the account given by Ibn al-Athir, the citizens made George of Antioch’s job easy,. When the Sicilian ships arrive on June 15 Tripoli was already facing a crisis of internal order. The governor, a member of the Arab clan known as Banu Matruh, had been overthrown in favor of a visiting dignitary from the Almoravids, the veil-wearing, intolerant puritans who had overrun Morocco and Muslim Spain. Having stopped in Tripoli on his way to perform hajj at Mecca, the Amoravid suddenly found himself defending the city from a Sicilian fleet off the coast while trying to quell rebellion in the streets. Seeing the disarray and sensing an easy victory, George of Antioch sent his men to erect ladders and scale the defenses. ‘After fierce fighting the Franks took the city by sword,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir. The battle was followed by ‘a bloodbath and seizure of women and property.’

From this point, the conquest of Ifriqiya proceeded apace. Town governors abandoned their allegiance to the Zirids of Mahdia in favor of the Franks across the water. George of Antioch forced the hand of those who resisted. In short order Gabers, Susa and Sfax became formal Sicilian protectorates. In 1148, when Mahdia itself fell, the Zirid palaces would be looted and their riches shipped back to Palermo.

At the time when the Second Crusade had just been called and preachers all over Western Europe were summoning Christians to take up arms against Islamic enemies, a campaign of conquest and tribute taking by a Christian king against Muslim neighbors was bound to attract notice, even if it occurred many hundreds of miles from the Holy Land. When Ibn al-Athir wrote about the Sicilian campaigns against Ifriqiya many years later, he placed them squarely in his broader narrative of Frankish reaction to the fall of Edessa. This was a natural enough conclusion. That Roger and George of Antioch’s assaults amounted at least superficially to a campaign of  Christian expansion seemed to be confirmed in 1148, when Pope Eugene formally appointed an archbishop of Africa. Unsurprisingly many Muslims in Ifriqiya burned with the humiliation of being subjugated by unbelievers; after the governor of Gabes sent an envoy to negotiate peaceful submission to Roger, he was kidnapped by his disgusted rivals and tortured to death, ending his days choking on his own severed penis. ( The governor’s envoy, meanwhile, was dressed in a pointed hat covered in bells, paraded about Mahdia strapped to a camel and then stoned to death by a mob.)

Despite this, however, Roger of Sicily’s attacks on Ifriqiya did not fit neatly into Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Eugene’s rhetoric and theory of crusading. For one thing, Roger made no serious effort to place his African ambitions in the context of crusade preaching and did not personally take the cross. He no doubt remembered that at the height of the Roman Church’s schism in the 1130s, Pope Innocent II had preached holy war against Sicily and the other supporters of Anacletus, stating that the participants would earn crusade privileges. Nor did George of Antioch’s fleet set sail under crusader crosses, baying for blood. They were primarily agents of a pragmatic, self-serving policy focused on economic gain and a desire to expand Sicilian kingship beyond the shores of the island itself.

Nowhere was this more obvious than in Tripoli itself. After the city fell there was the customary period of plunder. But soon enough George of Antioch declared amnesty, promised to protect citizens’ property and invited those who had fled in fear of their lives to return to the city. A Sicilian garrison was installed, the walls strengthened and a moat dug. Yet Tripoli was neither occupied nor forcibly Christianized. Six months later the Banu Matruh recognized Roger’s lordship and were returned to power, having agreed that Muslims in Tripoli  now owed to the king of Sicily the same taxes as Muslims on the island: the jizya and a land tax. The Arab governor (wali) would henceforth wear a robe of office sent directly from Palermo, but a balance of power sensitive to the ethnic makeup of the population was achieved by the appointment of a Berber chief magistrate (qadi). An active policy of resettlement began, with Sicilians and others under Roger’s rule being encouraged to cross to Ifriqiya. So while Tripoli had been taken by a Christian fleet that inflicted terrible bloodshed, soon enough it was back under Islamic government and its economy was booming. ‘It quickly flourished and its affair prospered,’ wrote Ibn al-Athir.

Here, then, was a form of Christian expansion that defied easy categorization, even against the background noise of the Second Crusade preaching. It reflected,, perhaps, Roger’s complex cultural inheritance and that of Norman Sicily at large. Although certainly a Christian, and related by blood to many illustrious crusaders, Roger was also strongly influenced by Arabic and Greek culture. His royal mantle, made in Palermo’s leading workshop to celebrate his coronation, gave this mixed inheritance striking visual form. A beautiful red silk garment decorated with garnets, pearls, rubies and sapphires, it was embroidered with gold thread with lions attacking camels – a metaphor for the Norman victory over the Arab world. Yet this handsome cloak was also  proudly inscribed with Kufic Arab script, which gave the date of its creation in Islamic form (528 rather than 1133-34). When Roger occasionally issues charters in Latin ( he preferred Greek and Arabic) he was king ‘by the grace of Allah.’ But coins minted during his reign declared him ‘powerful through the grace of Allah’ In a contemporary mosaic (commissioned by none other than George of Antioch) in the Church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio in Palermo, Roger is depicted receiving his crown from Christ while dressed like a Christian emperor. Yet he generally preferred to comport himself like an Egyptian caliph: wearing Arab dress, only showing his face on feast days, parading with horses decked in gold and silver before him and having a parasol borne above his head- a distinctive symbol of specifically Fatimid preeminence.

Roger’s genius, aided and abetted by George of Antioch, was his ability to combine, into a singular Sicilian whole, elements of all cultures that coexisted under his leadership. Ibn al-Athir, writing after the events, looked at Roger and merely saw an acquisitive, piratical ‘Frank’ to be cursed with the rest of them; but Roger was actually a very long way from the stereotype of the zealot crusade. It was telling indeed that he and George of Antioch limited their assault on the Islamic world during the 1140s to the North African trading stations that could serve Sicily’s economy. When the armies of the Second Crusade began to move in mid-1147 Roger thought less of supporting their adventure in the Holy Land than exploiting the disruption caused by Louis and Conrad’s march on Constantinople to plunder Byzantine islands in the Adriatic.

As Roger focused his efforts on expanding Sicilian rule in North Africa, the real crusaders beyond the Alps were driving towards departure for the East. In a grand council held in Chalon-sur-Marne in early February 1147 the French and German crusade leaders decided that that they would not travel via Sicily. (Conrad in particular had no wish to deal with Roger II, whom he regarded as a deadly enemy.) Pope Eugene had called on the faithful to emulate the deeds of their forefathers, so it was in their forefathers’ footsteps they would go: following the Danube through Hungary and then traversing the Balkans to Constantinople, crossing Asian Minor with the support of the eastern emperor Manuel I Komnenos before descending into the crusader states via Antioch. Planning and provisioning for this notoriously difficult journey, along with the political preparation for regencies in both the French and German kingdoms, occupied the weeks leading up to Easter, the symbolic date on which the two armies had agreed to set out.

As they plotted their route, however, a new strand to crusading emerged. In Saxony a faction of the crusaders had come together whose motivation was no less self-interested than Roger of Sicily’s. They too saw their opportunities much closer to home: not among the Judean hills or on the Aleppan plateau, but in the river lands that fed the Baltic Sea. Here- in what is now norther Poland and northeast Germany – lived Slavic tribes referred to collectively (if imprecisely) as the Wends. The Wends were pagans. Their deities were to be found not in heaven but in the features of the natural earth, such as oak trees, brooks and rocks. They worshipped in timber-built temples rather stones churches. They sacrifices cattle and revered inhuman idols such as the four-headed Svantovit, and they did not take kindly to attempts to baptize them into subservience.*They were, in the view of a small but significant number of Conrad’s subjects, entirely fair game.

Just as was the case in Ifriqiya, sparring between Christians and non-Christians in the Baltic regions had been under way for many years before the genesis of crusading. Since Carolingian times in the ninth century armies commanded by God-fearing lords had fought wars of expansion into pagan territories and left their cultural stamp by appointing bishops and building churches. (This had been done most successfully in Denmark, where Christianity had been embraced in the 960s. By the eleventh century the eastern boundary of the Christian domain coincided more or less with the course of the river Elbe. Then, for a time, missionaries rather than soldiers crossed the line into Wendish country. But by the early twelfth century a desire colonize and Christianize by force was rising once again.

Around the year 1108 a Flemish clerk in the service of Adalgod, archbishop of Magdeburg, composed a document known as the Magdeburg Letter. It made an impassioned case for external military assistance against the Wends who, the letter claimed, were committing atrocities against good Christians folk. ‘We have been weighed down for a very long time by the many kinds of oppressions and disasters which we have suffered at the hands of the pagans,’ it stated. ‘They have profaned the churches of Christ with idolatry . . . they invade our region very frequently and, sparing no one, they lay waste, kill, overthrow and afflict with carefully chosen torments. They behead some and offer the heads to their demons . . .they allow some to endure the gibbet and to drag out a life that is more wretched than death . . .by means of gradual dismemberment . . .They skin while they are still living and, after scalping them, they disguise themselves with their scalps and burst into Christian territories.’ Lurid accounts of blood-drinking ceremonies followed before the author called on his ‘dearest brothers in all of Saxony, France, Lorraine and Flanders to prepare for holy war . . . this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live.’ The country, he wrote, with a faint but distinct echo of the famous biblical description of the Promised Land (Exodus 3:8), was rich in meat, honey, corn and birds ‘and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for the wealth of its produce.’ In 1108 all this had come to nothing because Pope Paschal II had declined to authorize crusading against the Wends. But nearly four decades on things had changed.

During the early 1140s a dozen or so Christian noble families from Saxony had begun a unilateral military push into Wendish country to enrich themselves on colonized land. They cut a swath through the borderlands known as the Saxon Lines, ousting Slavic Wagrian and Polabian people and building fortresses to mark the extent of their land grab. In their wake came families of Christian settler-farmers and teams of missionary priests. Wendish serfs were driven from their lands. Wendish chiefs were forced to accept the lordship of Christian lords like Albert the Bear, margrave of Brandenburg. This was in itself bad news for the Wends. With th

In March 1147 Bernard of Clairvaux attended a meeting in Frankfurt, convened to thrash out arrangements for Conrad III’s march on the Holy Land. But far from agreeing to join their king, however, Saxon nobles put their case for staying home and fighting the Wends. ‘They had as neighbors certain tribes that were given over to the filthiness of idolatry,’ recalled Otto of Freising, ‘and in like manner took the cross in order to assail  these races in war.’ Recognizing that this was a considerable deviation from the crusading mission Eugene envisioned when he heard that Zengi had stormed the walls of Edessa, the Saxons had come up with a new style of crusader cross: ‘not sewn simply to their clothes, but brandished a lot, surmounted on a wheel.’

This was plainly unorthodox, but Bernard of Clairvaux was never one to recoil from radical ideas. He like what he saw, and straightaway dipped his pen to support the Saxon’s right to make holy war not on Muslims but on the Wends. In a letter packed tightly with biblical allusion and apocalyptic bombast, he declared that the Baltic pagans, through little more than their existence in places the Saxons wanted to colonize, represented perfectly well as the enemies of God, ‘whom, if I may say so, the might of Christendom has endured to long.’ No truce or peace was to be made with these people, he thundered. They were to be battled until such time as they were either ‘converted or deleted.’ On April 13, Pope Eugene formerly agreed. He issued a bull, Divina Dispensatione, permitting the same remission of sins and spiritual benefits for fighting in the Baltic region as accrued to those joining Conrad and Louis. Thus, from July 1147 armies of Danes and Saxons roared into Wendish territory and spent several months burning temples and forcibly baptizing prisoners. They were only partially successful: captured Slavs tended to accept baptism with a shrug before returning to pagan ritual and thinking no more about it; and eventually the Wendish chief Prince Nyklot agreed to pay tribute for peace, in the sort of deal Bernard of Clairvaux has specifically abominated. Nonetheless, in 1147 another  front of crusading had been opened. For the next four decades the Wends would be steadily pursued to the conversion or deletion that Bernard of Clairvaux had commanded, and their lands divided greedily between  various Christian powers who connived at their destruction. By the 1180s, they had effectively been wiped out. But the appetite for Christian expansion in the Baltic, under the guise of crusading, was not. Three hundred years of warfare between Germanic armies and pagan tribes and kingdoms had begun.


The final target of the Second Crusade was far from the lands of the Ziridis and the Wends, and further still from Edessa and Jerusalem. Indeed, it was about as far west as one could go in mainland Europe before being swallowed by the uncharted maw of the Atlantic Ocean. It was the kingdom of Portugal . . .

* not a characterization the Jesuit Missionaries of the 17^th and 18^th centuries or Malinowski might have made.

The Road Stalin Traveled by Ronald Grigor Suny

 

[In the late 1940s the temptation to make sense of the seemingly senseless brutality of the Stalin led Gustav Bychowski, a clinical professor of psychiatry in New York City, to make the first explicitly psychoanalytic reconstruction of Stalin’s early life. Basing his analysis on Ioseb Iremashvili, Bychowski argued that Stalin’s reach for power was a ‘struggle of the son against the father,’ a repetition of the kind of struggles that go on in ‘primitive tribal societies. His Stalin was a man driven by a deep pathology, an identification with his native land’s enemy, a thirst for flattery, whose inner impulses were shaped by the violence of the revolution.

About the time that Bychowski was writing, a young American diplomat stationed in Moscow was himself engaged in psychological investigations. While still in the USSR, Robert C. Tucker repeatedly read Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth and was impressed by her concept of the ‘neurotic character structure.’ Tucker’s Stalin wanted political power in order to become the ‘acknowledged leader of the Bolshevik movement, a second Lenin.’ His rise to power and his autocracy were to be understood as the outcome of four major influences – Stain’s personality, the nature of Bolshevism, the Soviet regime’s historical situation in the 1920s, and the historical political culture of Russia (‘a tradition of autocracy and popular acceptance of it’). The rough treatment by his father and the great love of his mother created a psychological tension in the young Stalin, simultaneously ‘the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success’ and ‘anxieties and threats to self-esteem.’ It was only a small step to the militant Marxism of Lenin and to a psychological identification with his new hero. ‘Lenin was for Djugashvili everything that a revolutionary leader ought to be, and that he too would like to be insofar as his capacities permitted.’ Rather than a psychoanalysis of Stalin, Tucker’s work used psychoanalytic insights to discover Stalin’s deepest motivations. On the whole the work is redeemed by the care and tentativeness of the psychological speculation and the more traditional reliance on other factors. But at times one has the feeling that Tucker, like other practitioners of psychohistory, “comes to the past with an understanding already in hand; the understanding and explanation do not emerge from the past itself but are the products of a theoretical model. In short, it is often less accurate to say that the model is applied to the past than that the past is applied to the model.”]

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Like most successful politicians Stalin was a practiced performer. He leaned to play numerous roles as he moved from provincial poverty to state power. The journey he traveled was a painful educational odyssey. Skills were acquired as the hard experiences of an outlaw life toughened him. Stalin grew up with models of a weak, irresponsible father and a strong, principled mother. Beso Jughashvili was a failure  as a husband and father; he could not reliably provide for his wife and son. Alcoholic and abusive, he was not a ‘true man’ to his family or society. A katsi gained respect as much by restraint,  in using violence or in drinking, as he did earning a living, entertaining friends, and being loved and obeyed by his wife and children. Beso failed in all respects, while Keke took over the role of the man in the family, became the head of the household, protected and promoted her son, and provided an example of hardness, strength, stubborn insistence on and faith in her chosen ideals.

Already in the Gori church school Soso Jughashvili showed devotion, even fanatical dedication, to his system of belief, at the time the Orthodoxy of his mother’s church. Once committed to a faith he did not easily display doubt. When he shifted beliefs he did so abruptly, radically, decisively, as when he gave up Christianity for Marxism. From his school and seminary he picked up elements of his own pedagogy: explanations could be, should be, conveyed in plain language. He sought clarity, simplicity, not theoretical complication. With Marxism, particularly in its Leninist version, he believed he had discovered how the world works. More than that, he acquired the means to change it.

Stalin’s political education took place largely in the bowls of the party underground, in the intense partisan infighting between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Here he sharpened his polemical tools, deploying what minor oratorical skills he had, but largely relying on simple exposition of fundamentals. His own lack of conceptual facility actually aided him in presenting a reduced message plainly to plain folk, and he gained a following that appreciated this quality. Stalin was able to tell a comprehensible story, a clear narrative, repeating themes or words over and over again that made him intelligible to his audience. He instinctively grasped what political psychologists have noted: that a simple idea repeated, no matter how absurd or untruthful, has a greater impact than a more sophisticated but complicated conception.

The young Soso did not have the full, extended support of a close and loving family, as did Lenin, but he acquired successive circles of friends, comrades, and subordinates on whom he depended for help as he made his way through two decades of outlaw life. He was able to evince devotion from others, like the fanatical Kamo. Yet his relationship with friends was instrumental, based on a calculation as to their usefulness. He could feel deeply about those who he needed, like the Alliluevs, and had a soft, erotic side that he showed to the many women who passed through his life. But he could turn hostile quickly, hold grudges, and callously dismiss those whom he considered his enemies.

Revolution was his profession, and through his work in the party underground and with workers in Baku and Saint Petersburg, hardened by the violence of 1905-1907 and his suffering in prison and exile, he arrived in 1917 a man who had preserved his own ideals and was prepared as a pragmatic Marxist to use the means necessary to further the Bolshevik cause. Sentimentality had largely been suppressed. Empathy had eroded. In their place was a Machiavellian calculus – discipline, toughness, violence, even cruelty in this bitter political battle.

In the Georgia in which he grew up violence was an everyday occurrence – in the family, from the state, against the state. There was the arbitrary, unjustified violence, like that suffered from his father, and violence sanctioned by tradition, by the great epics of Georgian literature and the stories of modern writers like Qazbegi. Revenge could be a necessary, even ennobling, pursuit, the effecting of rough justice, the righting of an unbearable wrong. For a revolutionary violence was simply a basic tool of the trade. Without it came defeat; with it, victory.

From his earliest years in Gori he was ambitious, anxious to change his place in the world and willing to take risks to do it. He wanted to stand out, to succeed, but his was a controlled ambition, concealed under a diffident demeanor. He did not announce himself but lurked, hid behind a sly smile, waited for others to expose themselves first. Many people remarked on his sense of humor, his love of jokes, but many more noted how he stood apart or sat silently to the side, watching, observing, and sizing up the situation. His smile was ironic, sardonic, not engaging. He governed his emotions carefully. What passion he had was reserved for his work and the cause to which he had given his life.

In the years leading up to the revolution he was willing to work with those he admired and respected, like Lenin, but he was contemptuous of those elders like Zhordania or Plekhanov or movement veterans like Trotsky with whom he disagreed. Stalin was endowed with self-confidence that passed beyond the boundary into arrogance. His disdain for those with whom he disagreed extended even to Friedrich Engels, whom in the post-revolutionary years he would refer to privately as incorrect or ‘foolish.’ While Lenin was flexible and changed his mind about people, able to ally with Trotsky or contemplate working with Martov, whom he valued even though they had fought against one another for over a decade, Stalin found that kind of compromise difficult. Whether it was resentment, jealousy, or disgust, he was unable to subordinate his affective disposition towards such people to what might better serve the movement. He did not appreciate refinement or gentility but preferred a rougher manner, affecting what he took to be a proletarian toughness. He operated best with acolytes like Soren Spandarian or Kamo, but was less able to get along with more independent people like the genteel Stephan Shahumian or te punctilious Iakov Sverdlov. His relationship with long-time comrades like Kamenev or Orjonikidze was even more complicated, as the power and position of each of these men shifted within the Bolshevik hierarchy. Like Lenin he could be contemptuous of intellectuals, even though in the scheme of things he was an intelligent. His intellectual interests, however, were directed towards confirmation rather than questioning. He was not introspective like Sverdlov. He appreciated the plainness of ordinary people. His nature was narrow, not as open and generous as Lenin.

Through the years of revolution in Caucasia and the long odyssey through the underground and in exile his earlier idealism fell away before what worked in practice. A realistic calculation of means and ends eliminated his youthful romanticism. But he was more than a simple pragmatist. By the time he was Koba, he had a reputation within Georgian Social Democracy both as a talented organizer and an untrustworthy intriguer. He acted on his impulses, personal and political, and was ready without much reflection to deceive or lie or turn on his comrades without consideration of what he may have promised or committed to earlier. His self-assurance led him dogmatism. In contrast to Marx or Lenin, doubt was foreign to him. At age twenty-five he had strong opinions that were resistant to change. Yet when faced by strong opposition to his convictions, he was able for practical reasons to shift quickly and decisively, as the incident over his ‘credo’ demonstrated. To rejoin the movement and win over Tskhakaia, his patron, Koba abandoned his ‘Georgian Bundism’ and accepted with little hesitation the party’s position against autonomous national political units.

Russia became more important to him than Georgia. His conviction that Russian culture and society were more modern, more proletarian, and therefore superior to the cultures of the people of the periphery, particularly those of the southern and eastern borderlands, grew stronger in the post-revolutionary years of civil war. Nation was subordinated to what was thought to be internationalism but would in time evolve into empire, the inequitable rule of some over others. In a variation of the theme proposed long before  by Marx and Engels, that some small nations were geschichtslose**, Stalin accepted the imperial notion that selected nations were on the right side of history and others were fated to be pulled by force into the light of modernity.

His pragmatism led him to moderation rather to any extreme. The early impulsiveness  that had resulted in the massacre of workers in Batumi and Soso’s first arrest may have tempered him. Although there were moments of exuberant militancy, as in the revolutionary years 1905-1907 and 1917, a degree of caution overlain with suspicion preserved him while on the run. The underground required a cool deliberation as well as wariness in choosing one’s companions. Prudence and watchfulness were necessary qualities for survival. In his years in power Stalin would raise the practice of ‘vigilance’ (bditel’nost’) to a supreme virtue for Soviet citizens. By that time, the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn mused, suspicion became his ideology. Rather than being the most radical of revolutionaries, until his fiftieth birthday Stalin was  (with a few notable exceptions) a man of the middle, ready to compromise, to accommodate others in order to achieve the goal at hand. Uncomfortably, he distinguished himself from Lenin in the squabbles over the Bolshevik left – Bogdanov and the otzovisti – and was not convinced that the philosophical arguments that Lenin considered so vital were important enough to divide their faction.  IN 1917 he was at first close to his moderate friend Kamenev, and only after Lenin’s return to Russia in April did he shift his position and recognize that young Molotov had been more correct than he  in the principal strategic questions. Unlike Lenin he usually emphasized the need for party unity, for bringing various factions and sub-factions together. Lenin, in contrast, was ready at times to split the party when he saw differences of principle, even to stand all alone against those whom he considered misguided. Yet it would be Lenin’s tactics that Stalin would employ after the revolution. At one and the same time he would speak about unity only to divide, isolate his adversaries, and solidify a core around himself. When he considered it necessary or advantageous, he adopted the most extreme and radical measures against his opponents, resistant peasants and officials, in 1928-1932 and again in 1936-1938. In the name of unity he would carry out the massive, murderous elimination of those labeled ‘Enemies of the People.’

More than any other episode, the crucible that forged him as a revolutionary was the first revolution, the one that ultimately failed, 1905-1907. Talk of violence gave way to the actual exercise of terrorism. The imperial government was determined to crush the rebellion and preserve the empire, and a sanguinary civil war tore the Caucasus apart. The revolutionaries took up arms, first in self-defense and then more aggressively to punish their enemies and make a desperate effort to take power. Tsarism responded to the rebellion of workers and peasants with sanguinary repression, demonstrating that the state and those who benefited from the existing order would never surrender their privileges, property, and power without bloodshed. Like other Bolsheviks Stalin read the defeat not as a need to be more cautious in the future, but as a bitter lesson that carrying the fight to the finish, however ferocious that might be, was the only road to victory.

Revolution was not normal politics. It quickly became something beyond compromise and negotiation. Revolution was war, in fact the most devastating of wars, civil war, war within society and against the state, in many ways war without mercy. Such a war carried its own imperatives: the clear defining of enemies; the willingness to kill so as not to be killed; the subordination of feeling to what was needed to achieve victory. This logic of war –we versus them, destroying the enemy while preserving your own –became fundamental to his thinking.  Once politics or any conflict is conceived as war, the most extreme means, including killing ones’ enemies and those who might support them even in the future, is legitimized and normalized.

 

Before coming to power Russian revolutionaries had very different motives from those after the October victory. Before 1917 Stalin was animated by a complex of ideas and emotions, from resentment and hatred to utopian hopes for justice and empowerment of the disenfranchised. Social Democracy universally was about democracy, the empowerment of ordinary working people and the end of unearned privileges of the well-born. The revolution at hand was a bourgeois-democratic one until the imperialist war of 1914 opened the way to a more rapid transition to a proletarian-socialist revolution. That project of democracy, revolution, and socialism empowered a poor young man from the borderlands of the empire, and combined with the anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist program embedded in Marxism erased the disadvantages of the ethnic Georgian or Jew or Tarter. Soso Jughashvili imbibed the democratic and socialist humanism that he discovered in both the Russian intelligentsia and the heroes of Georgian and Russian literature, while Koba came to appreciate how cruel the struggle to change the world would be.

Over time the humane sensibilities of the romantic poet gave way to hard strategic choices. Feelings for others were displaced or suspended and were trumped by personal and political interests. What originated as empathy for the plight of one’s people (the Georgians), a social class (the proletariat), or humanity more broadly was converted to a rational choice of instruments to reach a preferred end. Empathy was replaced by an instrumental cruelty. Once in power those earlier emotions and ideals were subordinated to the desire to hold onto to the power so arduously and painfully acquired. Power became a key motivator as the imperatives of the new conditions in which Bolsheviks found themselves forced them to make unanticipated choices. ‘Possession of power,’ wrote Immanuel Kant, ‘debases the free judgment of reason.’ But power was seldom simply about personal aggrandizement or advancement. Based on convictions derived from experience, history, and Marxism, power also served the commitment to a certain vision of the future.

The boy from Gori became a ‘great man’ – that is, a powerful arbitrator of the fate of millions. His decisions as head of state and party decided who would live and who would die. He explained to his aged mother, regretful that he had not become a priest, that he became something like a tsar. That ‘greatness’ was not prefigured in Gori or Tiflis or Baku.  But the passage trough those places, as well as Petersburg and Siberia, fashioned the man who in a world he could not have anticipated was determined to stamp his will on the Soviet people. He was the product not only of the circumstances in which he had been born and grew up, the excesses of imperial rule in the Caucasus, but also of his own ambition, his desire to move somehow beyond the limits that poverty and empire have imposed on him.

From his earliest days Stalin understood that education was the road to emancipation. With Marxism and the Social Democratic Party he found the way to change his world. Whether it was fate or luck, he survived the trials of the revolutionary outlaw and emerged a tempered leader. The trials ahead –civil war, an unexpected political rise to unchallenged autocrat, a revolution initiated by the state against the bulk of the population, and another world war – damaged and destroyed others, but Stalin survived. History had hooked and lifted him high. A revolutionary made by revolutions, for the remainder of his life he became the maker and breaker of revolutions

*(quote from Thomas A. Kohut, ‘Psychohistory as History”, American Historical Review, XCI, 2 (April 1986) p. 338)]

** Land, Stadt with no history; Zeit with no historical records; Volk with no sense of history, ahistorical; Politik, Weltanschauung ahistorical

Dr. Henri Hekking

 

On Japan’s infamous Burma-Thailand Death Railway.

The disease-ridden jungle would have posed a challenge to Western medicine even under ideal sanitary conditions. Without instruments and manufactured pharmaceuticals close at hand, the best Allied doctors were helpless. In the jungles, these shortages could turn even the smallest wounds into death sentences.

Two Lost Battalion officers, Capt. Arch Fitzsimmons and Lt Jimmie Lattimore, having heard that a group of Dutch physicians was based farther down the line, went to the Japanese and begged them to order one of them to join Branch Three. Just one would make a difference between life and death. They offered their watches as a bribe. As it would turn out, a gifted Dutch doctor had heard of their plight and was asking for them in turn. In April, a doctor whom some of the Americans in Branch Three had met in Singapore showed up at the 40 Kilo Camp to join them as their on-site medical caretaker. His name was Henri Hekking.

Born in Suryabaya to Dutch parents, Hekking felt indeed that they were his islands. It was his grandmother, a committed herbalist and healer, who set him on the path to studying native medicine. When he was sixteen, his father’s work took him back to the Netherlands. Though he didn’t want to leave, Hekking went there to study medicine on a Dutch army stipend, then paid for his training with a ten-year term of service that took him back to the East Indies as a medical officer in the colonial army. There Hekking continued pursuing his grandmother’s art, first at Batavia, then at a hospital in the Celebes, and finally, before his capture by the Japanese, at a hospital in Timor. When the Japanese seized Timor and took him prisoner, it marked the end of his fulfillment of his promise to his oma that he would return and use his skills to help the natives of his homeland.

On his arrival at 40 Kilo Camp, Hekking introduced himself to the camp commander, Major Yamada. After exchanging niceties, the Dutchman told Yamada, ‘I wish to speak about food. The men will need meat.’

‘No meat,’ Yamada replied. ‘Later, Nippon kill water buffalo, Boom-boom. Understand-kah?’

Hekking was not bowed. ‘ The men must have meat and citrus – fruit, any kind of fruit.’

‘No fruit,’ the major said .  . . .

‘Prisoners are worthless driftwood washed ashore on the tide. In Japan, one who surrenders to the enemy was worse than useless, he was dead, for all practical purposes. He could never go home again, members of his family were disgraced, his offspring would suffer for many generations. But you are lucky; the railroad gives you the opportunity to redeem yourselves.’

The Lost Battalion’s Lt.  Lattimore, installed by Major Yamada as the food and supply officer, confronted the Japanese officer one day about the inadequacy of their daily ration. Yamada had informed Lattimore that working prisoners were to get a ration of five hundred to eight hundred grams of rice each day. In actuality, they were getting half that. The rice was ‘rotten and unusable, all of a grade the natives usually fed to cattle,’ Howard Charles wrote. But Hekking realized that the prisoners were contributing to the problem by washing their rice. He insisted that they stop. The ‘gray rice’ they were served – dirty floor sweepings with a certain proportion of bugs and other foreign garnishments – was in fact an important source of vitamins and protein.

Assisted by two orderlies, Slug Wright from the Lost Battalion and Robert Hanley from the USS Houston, Hekking ran the most challenging kind of solo practice. He devised some innovated remedies out of the jungle’s natural medicine chest. Certain types of leaves healed cuts. Long, saber-like legumes held beans that when crushed and boiled produced a tonic _’bitter as gall,’ according to Don Brain, but useful in reducing fevers. Hekking’s knowledge of jungle ailments and natural remedies was encyclopedic. If Pack Rat McCone was resourceful in stitching wounds with safety pins and twine, Henri Hekking took lifesaving resourcefulness to the level of mysticism, if not near divinity. He knew that palmetto mold could be used like penicillin, that pumpkin could be stored in bamboo stalks, fermented with wild yeast, and used to treat men suffering from beriberi (and it got them pleasantly drunk to boot). Tea brewed from bark contained tannins that constricted the bowels and slowed diarrhea. Wild chili peppers ha all sots of beneficial internal applications.

Hekking was supposed to report to British doctors who had been trained at the finest medical schools. Leery of native ways, they called him a witch doctor.  Hekking had as little regard for their practices as they did for his. Because supplies of quinine were limited, he never prescribed it preventatively. He preferred to encourage the immune system to function, and administered the medicine only to fight an actual infection. He mixed beef tallow with acetylsalicylic acid to fight athlete’s foot, distilled liquid iodine by mixing iodine crystals and sake, and ground up charcoal and mixed it with clay, a remedy that absorbed internal mucus. Assessing a skeletal patient squiring his insides out from dysentery, he could see beyond surface appearances and determine its underlying nature, amoebic or bacillary. When more potent medicines became available – Captain Fitzsimmons procured some sulfapyridine tablets once – Hekking would be miserly and economical, shaving the tablets down and administering the shavings directly into septic wounds. He used gasoline for alcohol, kapok for cotton, leaves for bandages, and latex for an adhesive.

Hekking thought the classically trained physicians were hopelessly out of their element. ‘It was most distressing to him,’ Howard Charles wrote, ‘discovering how different their approaches were to the treatment of tropical diseases . . . he was light-years ahead of these doctors.’ One of Branch Five medical officers, Captain Lumpkin, who practiced medicine in Amarillo before mustering for the war, said that any doctor who trained in the jungle with the Dutch East Indian Colonial Army knew more about tropical diseases than the collective mind of the American Medical Association.

Hekking saw his patients as whole human beings and treated the whole man. ‘He was the first man I ever herd of that treated a man as a unit,’ said Slug Wright. ‘He claimed that a man had to be cured two ways: the body was only a small part of it; the mind is important as well. So he cured the mind and body together. He was using psychosomatic medicine.’ Hekking sometimes turned around a patient in decline by intentionally angering him. He found that a rush of rage could be a lifesaving stimulant, even if the patient was in no shape to act a

out the impulse. Hekking inspired such confidence in his patients that even his placebos had powerful effects. He saved a different kind of placebo for the enemy. When Japanese soldiers came to him for help with venereal disease, he would send them back to the native black markets to get the medicine he needed. When the medication was brought to him, he would set it aside for the prisoners and inject the Japanese with water. Sometimes he gave them a salve of plain acid and told them to apply it regularly. He didn’t mind seeing them jump. He seemed fearless. Once he took a sulfapyridine tablet and made a mold of it. With the mold in hand, he was able to cast replicas using rice flour and plaster of Paris. He would trade the counterfeits to the Japanese for the quinine and other medicines his patients so urgently needed.

Hekking was the gatekeeper between the sick ward and the railway work parties. When the Japanese came around demanding workers, patients looked to him for a reprieve. Hekking would place the worst ones on the limited-duty or no-duty list. The next morning, if the Japanese couldn’t fulfill their quota of workers, they would go through the sick bay and grab the sick for duty on the line. It fell to the doctor to protest the selection. Many times, he got the hell pounded out of him for his audacity.

Henri Hekking worked one of his miracles on Jim Gee. The Marine was one of the first Houston men to go down with a fever, collapsing while digging a grave in the jungle out by 26 Kilo Camp. Taken to the medical tent, he lay unconscious for three days. His meltdown was so severe, his loss of fluids so pronounced, that he lost fifty pounds within a week. In the midst of his delirium, Gee remembered coming to and seeing a strange man speaking a strange tongue. He didn’t know if he was in heaven or hell. He heard someone say his struggle ha been long and difficult, that he had neatly lost his mind. It was Hekking, who for thirty-six hours straight had sat by his bed, patently enduring the Marine’s rage. Hekking had brought a large sack full of roots taken from a low-growing weed known as Cephaelis ipecacuanha. Major Yamada, in a show of mercy – or perhaps just impatience with Hekking’s doggedness – had permitted him to go into the jungle, under guard, to gather the plants. He boiled them into a herbal tonic and cajoled the Marine to drink, encouraging him, touching his hand to his patient’s clammy skin. Gee struggled to sit upright and drink. Hekking got some people to carry him outside and sat him in the sun. When Gee’s strength came back, the good doctor saw to it that he was taken back to the field hospital in Thanbyuzayat.